THE BORDER REPORT

I'm going to take this conversation in a different direction this afternoon and I'd like your input. I'm working on a project about murder in Mexico and some of my associates seem to be of the mind that there are innocents who are dying in Mexico's wars. Collateral killings, if you will. I argue they remain the exception. The vast exception.

I stand behind my premise that if you die in a gunfight in Mexico, the likelihood is that you were targeted, i.e., you were involved. There will be exceptions of course, crossfire incidences, wild shots, the parking attendant at Rodolfo Carrillo's hit, a waiter killed in Sonoyta. Perhaps the better discussion is to ask why we don't know who is dying. This delves into the realm of Mexico's magical realism. There's an entire genre on the topic. A poet whose names escapes me at the moment once said, "Mexico is a magical country where there are murders and no murderers."

Why doesn't the government solve these thousands of murder cases? Why are there hundreds of bodies buried in Juárez every year without identification?

Why aren't the missing included in crime statistics? Why aren't those 16 individuals at that party in Juárez exonerated or prosecuted post-humuously? What have we learned about those individuals beyond their ages and that they had families? Did any of them have crime records in either country? This seems to be the source of much of our greatest difficulties in ascertaining the threat level in Mexico: the government's intrinsic reluctance to exposing the true context of the murders in the country. On March 12, 8 people were killed at a party in Sinaloa. the killers came in with AKs, seeking a specific person. Nobody would talk so they killed eight of them. who died? How were they related to the man they were protecting? Did they deserve to die? Were they traffickers themselves? Or perhaps lawyers and business associates working for a Sinaloan trafficker? They were lined up and summarily executed. Somebody holding a gun set his eyes on a specific set of people and pulled them out. They stood out for some reason.

I find this element of Mexico's secrecy both infuriating and endlessly compelling.

My belief is that there is no good guy/bad guy situation, not in a linear way. Other than the occasional accidental killing, the distance of time between an individual's death and their reasons for being in the situation that led to their death seems to be the only division between the determination of a person's innocence and their guilt, i.e.., you may not have been guilty of anything right now, but I'd put money that you were guilty or involved, however peripherally, in the past. That is the paradox of organized crime.

Your thoughts.